Amen! In the future all web apps will use techniques like this! Go flickr go! Go flickrTime development go!

From Deploy every 30 minutes: Redux, 25/08/05, Secret Plans and Clever Tricks.:

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For most types of changes, the implementation is nothing more than a simple rsync from CVS HEAD onto the server farm. Sometimes an apachectl graceful, a squid/memcached flush or a restart of the various daemons is also required, but it's a zero-downtime thing even under peak loads.

- A similar on-click rollback to any previous version if it all goes wrong.

- A good separation of layers in the application to minimise liklihood of collateral damage from a change.

- A small team with pretty complete knowledge of the code that they're updating. (2 java programmers, 2 PHPers, a designer and a front-end guy)

- A component-based application infrastructure with clear interfaces between components. Most application logic is coded in PHP, with cacheing provided via Squid and memcached, and key long-running daemon processes in java. Individual components can be redeployed with comparatively little risk to other components, so long as interfaces aren't modified.

Surprisingly, there's not much weight put on automated testing. There are automated test suites for some key black-box components (the email parser for instance) and a few functional tess (written using perl's www:mechanize) but mostly they're reliant on developers testing on the staging server (though they now also have the services of yahoo's 'surfers' user-testing department).

Well. Quite frankly I'm jealous. Not that I don't think we could do it too, but it would be a lot of work to get there from where we are now. ISTM, also, that the benefits of of this set-up are a bit like doing XP; until you actually get everything working together you don't see much benefit, but once you do, suddenly it changes all the rules.

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